Now firmly established as the second biggest producer of silver bullion coins on this planet, the Royal Canadian Mint is using another planet to boost its sales even further. With the Silver Maple Leaf (SML) coin as the 500lb gorilla in the room, the RCM has regularly launched smaller mintage ‘semi-numismatic’ silver bullion coins that sell with a slightly higher premium to stimulate interest for those that want a little more than just a troy ounce of silver. Coin series like Canadian Wildlife and Birds of Prey have proven extremely popular, regularly selling out in short order, even with the ‘limited’ mintage sitting at one-million units per coin.

Now they’ve decided to tap into the rich vein of popular culture that many mints, the Royal Canadian amongst them, has found to be a source of much popularity with modern coin collectors. Dabbling previously with Looney Tunes, Star Trek and Superman themed coins for their numerous face-value ranges, they’ve now gone all in with this new Superman one-ounce bullion coin carrying one of the most recognised symbols in the world.

Struck in the usual 0.9999 silver, it’s a simple and bold enough design, not bothering with excess detail and sticking with a bold representation of Supermans Kryptonian symbol. Many other design elements are taken from the huge-selling SML such as the radiating lines, the micro-engraved nested Maple Leaf pattern with the number “16” (year of issue) in it, and the Susanna Blunt effigy of Queen Elizabeth II on the obverse.

The radiating lines and micro-engraving are security measures put in place to cut down on rampant counterfeiting, first introduced on the Gold Maple Leaf to great effect. Both make reverse-engineering dies to strike copies, orders of magnitude more difficult to accomplish with any success, and much easier to spot fakes when attempted.The coin is predominantly sold in the usual bullion way, tubes and monster boxes, but even here the RCM has extended the theming with coloured plastic containers and printed security sealing tape. The tubes each hold 25 coins, and there are 20 tubes in each monster box to make up the 500 coin total usually kept within. Even with a mintage of a million, huge by most bullion coin standards, this will likely be a quick seller, not because it’s a particularly impressive design, but simply because themed bullion coins are pretty rare on the market.

Available to order now, the coin will ship later this month. We’ve already seen it at APMEX, Provident, Gainesville, SD Bullion, SilverTowne, and ModernCoinMart, and no doubt others will follow, but buyers outside of North America may have more trouble than usual getting these because of licencing restrictions, big media conglomerates being notoriously restrictive with these things. It’s inevitable they’ll turn up in Europe however.